dawn shift
i.
the sky does this thing at 5am
where it forgets to be embarrassed —
pink just spilling out over the rooftops
like it didn't check first
if pink was allowed.
ii.
i want to be that unbothered.
i want to arrive somewhere
the color of a held breath finally let go
and not apologize
for how loud i am about it.
iii.
my mother says i was born at dawn.
i think that's why i keep starting over —
i was built out of the hour
that always gets a second chance.
the bus stop on maple
you'd think a bus stop couldn't hold that much,
but this one held an entire year of me —
the waiting, obviously, but also
the specific cold of november metal through a coat that wasn't warm enough,
the way i used to rehearse things i'd never say
to someone who never showed up anyway.
i went back last spring.
the bench is gone. there's a bike rack now.
i stood there for longer than a person should stand
in front of a bike rack,
grieving a bench
that never even loved me back.
that's the thing nobody warns you about —
you don't just miss the people.
you miss the furniture of missing them.
flash fiction: "the last light on"
(content note: gentle sadness, a warm ending. no notes app was harmed in the making of this, only my sleep schedule.)
Mira always left the porch light on, even after everyone stopped coming home. Her sister said it was a waste of electricity. Her sister said a lot of things, mostly from three states away, mostly in the tone people use when they've already decided you're being dramatic.
But the light wasn't for anyone in particular anymore. That was the part nobody understood. It wasn't a signal or an invitation. It was a small, stubborn refusal — a way of saying, this house is still awake enough to want something, even on the nights nothing came.
On the night it finally mattered again, it was raining the kind of rain that makes everything sound like it's confessing something. A car she didn't recognize idled at the curb for four minutes before a girl got out, hood up, shoulders around her ears, and stood at the bottom of the porch steps like she was waiting for permission that had already been given fifteen years ago.
"You kept it on," the girl said. Not a question.
"I kept a lot of things on," Mira said, and opened the door wider, and the light spilled out onto the wet steps the way it always had, the way it was always going to, for as long as it took.
— end.
my tiny writing manifesto
I don't believe in waiting for permission to write something. I don't believe in "finding time" — I believe in stealing it, from sleep, from group chats, from the fifteen minutes before a meeting that everyone else spends refreshing their email. Here's what I actually believe, in list form, because I am nothing if not extremely online about my own values:
- First drafts are allowed to be bad. That's the whole job of a first draft. It's not auditioning for anything.
- Feelings are data. If something makes you cry rereading it, that's not embarrassing, that's information.
- Write the sentence that scares you a little. Cut it later if you have to. But write it first.
- Every "unprofessional" or "too much" or "too soft" piece of writing I've ever made has ended up being someone's favorite thing I've written. Every time. So.
- You are allowed to write about a bus stop for 400 words. Nobody is going to stop you. I checked.